damn him for being right
I remember Stanley saying to me once when we were sitting around the fire after the caribou kill : you’re one of the last white people whose gonna get to see this.
Then he stopped himself and said no, you’re one of the last people to see it.
No one mentions people in the articles, nevermind what people may or may not be able to see. Nevermind that the word Gwich’in means people. A people. A nation, if certain treaties are to be believed. What the articles do mention is nation. We’re going to drill oil on the arctic plain because of national security.
I know one nation that won’t be national in ten years and sure as hell isn’t feeling secure.
Forty thousand years there have been people and caribou in the Arctic, and there are stories that go so far back that sometimes the two are the same. There are prayers that go just to the caribou, after the hunt, when the meat is still deep red and can be eaten raw. But the Gwich’in never go to the slope where the caribou calve - it is an old agreement, as old as the stories. Birth should be given in peace.
Neither peace nor birth seem particularly possible under the arm of an oil well. Another nation without security and oh don’t we know it from being told: without security there is no survival.
I desire infernal and poetic justice; a plane crash and all of 51 senators in their Brooks Brothers suits starving to death (once the cannibalistic possibilities are whittled to the bone) for lack of meat. That would do: starvation is slow and leaves time for regret.
Sometimes it seems like all I write about is this place but maybe that’s because now more than ever the words are all I have, all we have. And to think I imagined - this is the land of the free after all - taking my children back and letting them see that rite: the great bodies plunging into the river, the blood and heartbeats, the iron taste on the tongue.